1 Does it follow that we ought to go on sinning, to give still more occasion for grace? 2 God forbid. We have died, once for all, to sin; can we breathe its air again? 3 You know well enough that we who were taken up into Christ by baptism have been taken up, all of us, into his death. 4 In our baptism, we have been buried with him, died like him, that so, just as Christ was raised up by his Father’s power from the dead, we too might live and move in a new kind of existence. 5 We have to be closely fitted into the pattern of his resurrection, as we have been into the pattern of his death;[1] 6 we have to be sure of this, that our former nature has been crucified with him, and the living power of our guilt annihilated, so that we are the slaves of guilt no longer.[2] 7 Guilt makes no more claim on a man who is dead.[3] 8 And if we have died with Christ, we have faith to believe that we shall share his life. 9 We know that Christ, now he has risen from the dead, cannot die any more; death has no more power over him; 10 the death he died was a death, once for all, to sin; the life he now lives is a life that looks towards God.[4] 11 And you, too, must think of yourselves as dead to sin, and alive with a life that looks towards God, through Christ Jesus our Lord.

12 You must not, then, allow sin to tyrannize over your perishable bodies, to make you subject to its appetites. 13 You must not make your bodily powers over to sin, to be the instruments of harm; make yourselves over to God, as men who have been dead and come to life again; make your bodily powers over to God, to be the instruments of right-doing. 14 Sin will not be able to play the master over you any longer; you serve grace now, not the law. 15 And if it is grace, not the law, we serve, are we therefore to fall into sin? God forbid. 16 You know well enough that wherever you give a slave’s consent, you prove yourselves the slaves of that master; slaves of sin, marked out for death, or slaves of obedience, marked out for justification. 17 And you, thanks be to God, although you were the slaves of sin once, accepted obedience with all your hearts, true to the pattern of teaching to which you are now engaged.[5] 18 Thus you escaped from the bondage of sin, and became the slaves of right-doing instead. 19 I am speaking in the language of common life, because nature is still strong in you.[6] Just as you once made over your natural powers as slaves to impurity and wickedness, till all was wickedness, you must now make over your natural powers as slaves to right-doing, till all is sanctified. 20 At the time when you were the slaves of sin, right-doing had no claim upon you. 21 And what harvest were you then reaping, from acts which now make you blush? Their reward is death. 22 Now that you are free from the claims of sin, and have become God’s slaves instead, you have a harvest in your sanctification, and your reward is eternal life. 23 Sin offers death, for wages; God offers us eternal life as a free gift, through Christ Jesus our Lord.

[1] vv. 1-5: Here, as in Col. 2.12, St Paul thinks of baptism not as washing us from our sins, but as burying us to our sins. Baptism (which then suggested the idea of total immersion) mystically identifies us with our Lord’s passage through the tomb. (Cf. I Cor. 10.2.)

[2] ‘The living power of our guilt’; literally, ‘the body of guilt’. Some think that this means our bodies, considered as the instruments of sin; but this does not seem to follow the line of St Paul’s allegory.

[3] This probably introduces a maxim of ordinary human law; namely, that no criminal action lies against a man when he is already dead. Cf. 7.1 below.

[4] Christ died to sin, in the sense that the burden of human sins which he freely took upon himself demanded, as of right, his death, but now, having undergone that sentence, he has satisfied all the obligations which his condescension brought upon him.

[5] Some would translate, ‘You accepted obedience with all your hearts to the pattern of teaching which was handed on to you’.

[6] ‘Nature is still strong in you’; probably in the sense that they are not yet sufficiently advanced in spirituality to be able to understand St Paul unless he uses crude metaphors.